


The Great Lazuli

by Peridawesome



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald, Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - The Great Gatsby Fusion, Canon - Public Domain, Domestic Violence, F/F, F/M, Inspired by The Great Gatsby, Suicide, Violence, basically stuff that happens in The Great Gatsby
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:49:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28653780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Peridawesome/pseuds/Peridawesome
Summary: The Great Gatsby is public domain, so how about a straight-up Lapidot bootleg? Used find-and-replace for character names, pronouns, and other things.
Relationships: Amethyst/Peridot (Steven Universe), Connie Maheswaran/Steven Universe, Lapis Lazuli/Peridot (Steven Universe)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 8





	1. First Chapter of It

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point, I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Lazuli, the woman who gives her name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Lazuli, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about her, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if she were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Lazuli turned out alright at the end; it is what preyed on Lazuli, what foul dust floated in the wake of her dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family has been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Universes are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him — with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in my father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe — so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why — yes,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays, I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. She found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered her to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog — at least I had her for a few days until she ran away — and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some woman, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

“How do you get to West Egg village?” she asked helplessly.

I told her. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. she had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college — one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the “Yale News.”— and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram — life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of Empire City — and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of saltwater in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Florida Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals — like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end — but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless, a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the — well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard — it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Lazuli’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Ms. Lazuli, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires — all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay, the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Amethyst Quartzes. Peridot was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Amethyst in college. And just after the war, I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her wife, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven--a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. Her family was enormously wealthy--even in college freedom with money was a matter for reproach--but now she'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, she'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a woman in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Peridot over the telephone, but I didn't believe it--I had no sight into Peridot's heart but I felt that Amethyst would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens — finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Amethyst Quartz in riding clothes was standing with her legs apart on the front porch.

She had changed since her new Haven years. Now she was a sturdy straw-haired woman of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over her face and gave her the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of her riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body —she seemed to fill those glistening boots until she strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when her shoulder moved under her thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage — a cruel body.

Her speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness she conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people she liked — and there were men at New Haven who had hated her guts.

“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” she seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.” We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that she approved of me and wanted me to like her with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of her own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

“I’ve got a nice place here,” she said, her eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm, she moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half-acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motor-boat that bumped the tide offshore.

“It belonged to Demaine, the oilman.” she turned me around again, politely, and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.”

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as the wind did on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. There was a boom as Amethyst Quartz shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it — indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Peridot, attempted to rise — she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression — then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

“I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.” She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was the way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Maheswaran. (I’ve heard it said that Peridot’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate, Miss Maheswaran’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again — the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

“Do they miss me?” she cried ecstatically.

“The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.”

“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Amethyst. To-morrow!” Then she added irrelevantly: “You ought to see the baby.”

“I’d like to.”

“She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?”

“Never.”

“Well, you ought to see her. She’s ——”

Amethyst Quartz, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested her hand on my shoulder.

“What are you doing, Steven?”

“I’m a bondman.”

“Who with?”

I told her.

“Never heard of them,” she remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the East.”

“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” she said, glancing at Peridot and then back at me as if she were alert for something more. “I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”

At this point Miss Maheswaran said: “Absolutely!” with such suddenness that I started — it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently, it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

“I’m stiff,” she complained, “I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.”

“Don’t look at me,” Peridot retorted, “I’ve been trying to get you to Empire City all afternoon.”

“No, thanks,” said Miss Maheswaran to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, “I’m absolutely in training.”

Her host looked at her incredulously.

“You are!” she took down her drink as if it were a drop in the botAmethyst of a glass. “How you ever get anything done is beyond me.”

I looked at Miss Maheswaran, wondering what it was she “got done.” I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

“You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. “I know somebody there.”

“I don’t know a single ——”

“You must know Lazuli.”

“Lazuli?” demanded Peridot. “What Lazuli?”

Before I could reply that she was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging her tense arm imperatively under mine, Amethyst Quartz compelled me from the room as though she were moving a checker to another square.

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

“Why candles?” objected Peridot, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. “In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.” She looked at us all radiantly. “Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it.”

“We ought to plan something,” yawned Miss Maheswaran, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

“All right,” said Peridot. “What’ll we plan?” She turned to me helplessly: “What do people plan?”

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

“Look!” she complained; “I hurt it.”

We all looked — the knuckle was black and blue.

“You did it, Amethyst,” she said accusingly. “I know you didn’t mean to, but you did do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a ——”

“I hate that word hulking,” objected Amethyst crossly, “even in kidding.”

“Hulking,” insisted Peridot.

Sometimes she and Miss Maheswaran talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite a banter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here, and they accepted Amethyst and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close, in continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

“You make me feel uncivilized, Peridot,” I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. “Can’t you talk about crops or something?”

I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up unexpectedly.

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” exclaimed Amethyst violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”

“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by her tone.

“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

“Amethyst’s getting very profound,” said Peridot, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “She reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we ——”

“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Amethyst, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Peridot, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

“You ought to live in California —” began Miss Maheswaran, but Amethyst interrupted her by shifting heavily in her chair.

“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and ——” After an infinitesimal hesitation she included Peridot with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “— And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization — oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”

There was something pathetic in her concentration, as if her complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to her anymore. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the maid left the porch Peridot seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.

“I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically. “It’s about the maid’s nose. Do you want to hear about the maid’s nose?”

“That’s why I came over to-night.”

“Well, she wasn't always a maid; she used to be the silver polisher for some people in Empire City that had a silver service for two hundred people. she had to polish it from morning till night until finally, it began to affect her nose ——”

“Things went from bad to worse,” suggested Miss Maheswaran.

“Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally, she had to give up her position.”

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened — then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regrets, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

The maid came back and murmured something close to Amethyst’s ear, whereupon Amethyst frowned, pushed back her chair, and without a word went inside. As if her absence quickened something within her, Peridot leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.

“I love to see you at my table, Steven. You remind me of a — of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?” She turned to Miss Maheswaran for confirmation: “An absolute rose?”

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.

Miss Maheswaran and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said “Sh!” in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond, and Miss Maheswaran leaned forward unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.

“This Ms. Lazuli you spoke of is my neighbor ——” I said.

“Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.”

“Is something happening?” I inquired innocently.

“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Miss Maheswaran, honestly surprised. “I thought everybody knew.”

“I don’t.”

“Why ——” she said hesitantly, “Amethyst’s got some woman in Empire City.”

“Got some woman?” I repeated blankly.

Miss Maheswaran nodded.

“She might have the decency not to telephone her at dinner time. Don’t you think?”

Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots, and Amethyst and Peridot were back at the table.

“It couldn’t be helped!” cried Peridot with tense gaiety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Maheswaran and then at me, and continued: “I looked outdoors for a minute, and it’s very romantic outdoors. There’s a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line.

He’s singing away ——” Her voice sang: “It’s romantic, isn’t it, Amethyst?”

“Very romantic,” she said, and then miserably to me: “If it’s light enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the stables.”

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Peridot shook her head decisively at Amethyst the subject of the stables, in fact, all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at the table, I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone, and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what Peridot and Amethyst were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Maheswaran, who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism, was able to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament, the situation might have seemed intriguing — my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.

The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Amethyst and Miss Maheswaran, with several feet of twilight between them, strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while, trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf, I followed Peridot around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom, we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Peridot took her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.

“We don’t know each other very well, Steven,” she said suddenly. “Even if we are cousins. You didn’t come to my wedding.”

“I wasn’t back from the war.”

“That’s true.” She hesitated. “Well, I’ve had a very bad time, Steven, and I’m pretty cynical about everything.”

Evidently, she had reason to be. I waited but she didn’t say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.

“I suppose she talks, and — eats, and everything.”

“Oh, yes.” She looked at me absently. “Listen, Steven; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?”

“Very much.”

“It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about — things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Amethyst was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘all right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

“You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” she went on convincingly. “Everybody thinks so — the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.” Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Amethyst’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated — God, I’m sophisticated!”

The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Amethyst belonged.

Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light.

Amethyst and Miss Maheswaran sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to her from the Saturday Evening Post. — the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on her boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along with the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.

  
  


When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.

“To be continued,” she said, tossing the magazine on the table, “in our very next issue.”

Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.

“Ten o’clock,” she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”

“Connie’s going to play in the tournament to-morrow,” explained Peridot, “over at Westchester.”

“Oh — you’re Connie Maheswaran.”

I knew now why her face was familiar — its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.

“Good night,” she said softly. “Wake me at eight, won’t you.”

“If you’ll get up.”

“I will. Good night, Ms. Carraway. See you anon.”

“Of course you will,” confirmed Peridot. “In fact, I think I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Steven, and I’ll sort of — oh — fling you together. You know — lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing ——”

“Good night,” called Miss Maheswaran from the stairs. “I haven’t heard a word.”

“She’s a nice girl,” said Amethyst after a moment. “They oughtn’t to let her run around the country this way.”

“Who oughtn’t to?” inquired Peridot coldly.

“Her family.”

“Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Steven’s going to look after her, aren’t you, Steven? She’s going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her.”

Peridot and Amethyst looked at each other for a moment in silence.

“Is she from Empire City?” I asked quickly.

“From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white ——”

“Did you give Steven a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?” demanded Amethyst suddenly.

“Did I?” She looked at me.

“I can’t seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I’m sure we did. It sort of crept upon us and the first thing you know ——”

“Don’t believe everything you hear, Steven,” she advised me.

I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Peridot peremptorily called: “Wait!”

“I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West.”

“That’s right,” corroborated Amethyst kindly. “We heard that you were engaged.”

“It’s a libel. I’m too poor.”

“But we heard it,” insisted Peridot, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. “We heard it from three people, so it must be true.”

Of course, I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn’t even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come East. You can’t stop going with an old friend on account of rumors, and on the other hand, I had no intention of being rumored into marriage.

Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich — nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Peridot to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms — but apparently, there were no such intentions in her head. As for Amethyst, the fact that she“had some woman in Empire City.” was really less surprising than that she had been depressed by a book. Something was making her nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if her sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished her peremptory heart.

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone — fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with her hands in her pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in her leisurely movements and the secure position of her feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Ms. Lazuli herself, come out to determine what share washer of our local heavens.

I decided to call her. Miss Maheswaran had mentioned her at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call her, for she gave a sudden intimation that she was content to be alone —she stretched out her arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from her, I could have sworn she was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Lazuli she had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.


	2. Here's A Second Chapter!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now that I had the characters picked, this one was easier, but I had to pick a few more at random ones

About halfway between West Egg and Empire City the motor-road hastily  
joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, to  
shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of  
ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and  
hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and  
chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of  
men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.  
Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives  
out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey  
men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud  
which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift  
endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor Priyanka Maheswaran. The eyes of Doctor Priyanka Maheswaran are blue and  
gigantic--their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but,  
instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a  
nonexistent nose. Evidently, some wild wag of an oculist set them there to  
fatten her practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank herself  
into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But her eyes,  
dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over  
the solemn dumping ground.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and  
when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on  
waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an  
hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was  
because of this that I first met Amethyst Quartz's mistress.

The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His  
acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular  
restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about,  
chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I  
had no desire to meet her--but I did. I went up to Empire City with Amethyst on  
the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ash heaps she jumped  
to her feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the  
car.

"We're getting off!" she insisted. "I want you to meet my girl."

I think she'd tanked up a good deal at luncheon and her determination to  
have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that  
on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.

I followed her over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked  
back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Maheswaran's persistent  
stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick  
sitting on the edge of the wasteland, a sort of compact Main Street  
ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the  
three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night  
restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a  
garage--Repairs. HAROLD Smiley. Cars Bought and Sold--and I followed  
Amethyst inside.

The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the  
dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had  
occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that  
sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the  
proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands  
on a piece of waste. He was a brunette, spiritless man, anemic, and  
faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his  
light blue eyes.

"Hello, Miller, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the  
shoulder. "How's business?"

"I can't complain," answered Miller unconvincingly. "When are you going  
to sell me that car?"

"Next week; I've got my man working on it now."

"Works pretty slow, don't he?"

"No, he doesn't," said Amethyst coldly. "And if you feel that way about it,  
maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all."

"I don't mean that," explained Miller quickly. "I just meant----"

His voice faded off and Amethyst glanced impatiently around the garage. Then  
I heard footsteps on the stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a  
woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle  
thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously  
as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue  
crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an  
immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body  
were continually smoldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her  
husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Amethyst, looking him flush in  
the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her  
husband in a soft, coarse voice:

"Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down."

"Oh, sure," Miller agreed hurriedly and went toward the little office,  
mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. White ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in  
the vicinity--except his wife, who moved close to Amethyst.

"I want to see you," said Amethyst intently. "Get on the next train."

"All right."

"I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level."

She nodded and moved away from him just as Lars Miller  
emerged with two chairs from his office door.

We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before  
the Fourth of July and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting  
torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.

"Terrible place, isn't it," said Amethyst, exchanging a frown with Doctor  
Maheswaran.

"Awful."

"It does her good to get away."

"Doesn't her husband object?"

"Miller? He thinks she goes to see her sister in Empire City. He's so dumb  
he doesn't know he's alive."

So Amethyst Quartz and her girl and I went up together to Empire City--or not  
quite together, for Mrs. Miller sat discreetly in another car. Amethyst  
deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be  
on the train.

She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched  
tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in  
Empire City. At the news-stand, she bought a copy of "Town Tattle" and a  
moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream  
and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive  
she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one,  
lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this, we slid out from the  
mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she  
turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the  
front glass.

"I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get one  
for the apartment. They're nice to have--a dog."

We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to Kerry Moonbeam. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very  
recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.

"What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Miller eagerly as he came to the  
taxi-window.

"All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?"

"I'd like to get one of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got that  
kind?"

The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand, and drew  
one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.

"That's no police dog," said Tom.

"No, it's not exactly a polICE dog," said the man with disappointment  
in his voice. "It's more of an airedale." He passed his hand over the  
brown wash-rag of a back. "Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog  
that'll never bother you with catching a cold."

"I think it's cute," said Mrs. Miller enthusiastically. "How much is it?"

"That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you ten  
dollars."

The airedale--undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it somewhere  
though its feet were startlingly white--changed hands and settled down  
into Mrs. Miller's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with  
rapture.

"Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately.

"That dog? That dog's a boy."

"It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten  
more dogs with it."

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the  
summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turns the corner.

"Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here."

"No, you don't," interposed Amethyst quickly. "Sadie will be hurt if you don't  
come up to the apartment. Won't you,  
Sadie?"

"Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Riki. She's said to  
be very beautiful by people who ought to know."

"Well, I'd like to, but----"

We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds.  
At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of  
apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the  
neighborhood, Mrs. Miller gathered up her dog and her other purchases  
and went haughtily in.

"I'm going to have the Diamonds come up," she announced as we rose in the  
elevator. "And of course I got to call up my sister, too."

The apartment was on the top floor--a small living room, a small  
dining room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living room was crowded to  
the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it  
so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of  
ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was  
an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred  
rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself  
into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down  
into the room. Several old copies of "Town Tattle” lay on the table  
together with a copy of "Simon Called Peter" and some of the small  
scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Miller was first concerned with  
the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and  
some milk to which he added on his initiative a tin of large  
hard dog biscuits--one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer  
of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile, Amethyst brought out a bottle of whiskey  
from a locked bureau door.

I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that  
afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it  
although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful  
sun. Sitting on Amethyst's lap Mrs. Miller called up several people on the  
telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at  
the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so  
I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of "Simon  
Called Peter"--either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted  
things because it didn't make any sense to me.

Just as Amethyst and Sadie--after the first drink Mrs. Miller and I called  
each other by our first names--reappeared, company commenced arriving  
at the apartment door.

The sister, Riki, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty  
with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky  
white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more  
rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the  
old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about  
there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets  
jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary  
haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered  
if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated  
my question aloud, and told me she lived with a girlfriend at a hotel.

Mrs. Diamond was a pale feminine woman from the flat below. She had just  
shaved for there was a white spot of lather on her cheekbone and she  
was most respectful in her greeting to everyone in the room. She  
informed me that she was in the "artistic game" and I gathered later  
that she was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs.  
Miller's mother, which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. Her wife  
was shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. She told me with pride  
that her wife had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times  
since they had been married.

Mrs. Miller had changed her costume sometime before and was now  
attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon, which  
gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress, her personality had also changed. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she  
expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

"My dear," she told her sister in a high mincing shout, "most of these  
fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had a  
woman up here last week to look at my feet and when she gave me the  
bill you'd of thought she had my appendix out."

"What was the name of the woman?" asked Mrs. Diamond.

"Mrs Azurite. She goes around looking at people's feet in their own  
homes."

"I like your dress," remarked Mrs. Diamond, "I think it's adorable."

Mrs. Miller rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.

"It's just a crazy old thing," she said. "I just slip it on sometimes when  
I don't care what I look like."

"But it looks wonderful on you if you know what I mean," pursued  
Mrs. Diamond. "If Blue could only get you in that pose I think she could  
make something of it."

We all looked in silence at Mrs. Miller who removed a strand of hair from  
over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Blue Diamond  
regarded her intently with her head on one side and then moved her hand  
back and forth slowly in front of her face.

"I should change the light," he said after a moment. "I'd like to bring  
out the modeling of the features. And I'd try to get hold of all the  
back hair."

"I wouldn't think of changing the light," cried Yellow Diamond. "I think  
it's----"

Her wife said "SH!" and we all looked at the subject again whereupon  
Amethyst Quartz yawned audibly and got to her feet.

"You Diamonds have something to drink," he said. "Get some more ice and  
mineral water, Sadie, before everybody goes to sleep."

"I told that boy about the ice." Sadie raised her eyebrows in despair  
at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people! You have to keep  
after them all the time."

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the  
dog kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that  
a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.

"I've done some nice things out on Long Island," asserted Mrs. Diamond.

Amethyst looked at him blankly.

"Two of them we have framed downstairs."

"Two what?" demanded Amethyst.

"Two studies. One of them I call 'Montauk Point--the Gulls,' and the  
other I call 'Montauk Point--the Sea.' "

The sister Riki sat down beside me on the couch.

"Do you live down on Long Island, too?" she inquired.

"I live at West Egg."

"Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a woman named  
Lazuli. Do you know her?"

"I live next door to her."

"Well, they say she's a nephew or a cousin of Lemon Jade's. That's  
where all her money comes from."

"Really?"

She nodded.

"I'm scared of her. I'd hate to have her get anything on me."

This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted by  
Mrs. Diamond's pointing suddenly at Riki:

"Yellow, I think you could do something with HER," she broke out,  
but Mrs. Diamond only nodded in a bored way and turned her attention  
to Amethyst.

"I'd like to do more work on Long Island if I could get the entry. All  
I ask is that they should give me a start."

"Ask Sadie," said Amethyst, breaking into a short shout of laughter as  
Mrs. Miller entered with a tray. "She'll give you a letter of  
introduction, won't you, Sadie?"

"Do what?" she asked, startled.

"You'll give Diamond a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can  
do some studies of him." Her lips moved silently for a moment as she  
invented. " 'Lars Miller at the Gasoline Pump,' or something like  
that."

  
Riki leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: "Neither of them  
can stand the person they're married to."

"Can't they?"

"Can't STAND them." She looked at Sadie and then at Amethyst. "What I say is,  
why go on living with them if they can't stand them? If I was them I'd get  
a divorce and get married to each other right away."

"Doesn't she like Miller either?"

The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Sadie who had overheard  
the question and it was violent and obscene.

"You see?" cried Riki triumphantly. She lowered her voice again.  
"It's his wife that's keeping them apart. She's a Catholic and  
they don't believe in divorce."

Peridot was not a Catholic and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness  
of the lie.

"When they do get married," continued Riki, "they're going west to  
live for a while until it blows over."

"It'd be more discreet to go to Europe."

"Oh, do you like Europe?" she exclaimed surprisingly. "I just got back  
from Monte Carlo."

"Really."

"Just last year. I went over there with another girl."

"Stay long?"

"No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of Marseilles.  
We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started but we got gypped  
out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful time  
getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!"

The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue  
honey of the Mediterranean--then the shrill voice of Mrs. Diamond called me  
back into the room.

"I almost made a mistake, too," she declared vigorously. "I almost  
married a little clod who'd been after me for years. I knew he was  
below me. Everybody kept saying to me: 'Blue, that man's way below  
you!' But if I hadn't met Yellow, he'd of got me sure."

"Yes, but listen," said Sadie Miller, nodding her head up and down,  
"at least you didn't marry him."

"I know I didn't."

"Well, I married him," said Sadie, ambiguously. "And that's the  
difference between your case and mine."

"Why did you, Sadie?" demanded Riki. "Nobody forced you to."

Sadie considered.

"I married him because I thought he was a gentleman," she said finally.  
"I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick  
my shoe."

"You were crazy about him for a while," said Riki.

"Crazy about him!" cried Sadie incredulously. "Who said I was crazy about  
him? I never was any crazier about him than I was about that man  
there."

She pointed suddenly at me, and everyone looked at me accusingly.  
I tried to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past.

"The only CRAZY I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a  
mistake. He borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in and never  
even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out.  
She looked around to see who was listening: " 'Oh, is that your suit?' I  
said.  
'This is the first I ever heard about it.' But I gave it to him and then I  
lay down  
and cried to beat the band all afternoon."

"She really ought to get away from him," resumed Riki to me.  
"They've been living over that garage for eleven years. And Amethyst's the  
first sweetie she ever had."

The bottle of whiskey--a second one--was now in constant demand by all  
present, excepting Riki who "felt just as good on nothing at all."  
Amethyst rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches,  
which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk  
eastward toward the park through the soft twilight but each time I tried  
to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me  
back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of  
yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the  
casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and  
wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled  
by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Sadie pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath  
poured over me the story of her first meeting with Amethyst.

"It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the  
last ones left on the train. I was going up to Empire City to see my  
sister and spend the night. She had on a dress suit and patent leather  
shoes and I couldn't keep my eyes off her but every time she looked at  
me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over her head.  
When we came into the station he was next to me and his white  
shirt-front pressed against my arm--and so I told her I'd have to call  
a policeman, but she knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into  
a taxi with her I hardly knew I wasn't getting into a subway  
train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live  
forever, you can't live forever.' "

She turned to Mrs. Diamond and the room rang full of her artificial  
laughter.

"My dear," she cried, "I'm going to give you this dress as soon as I'm  
through with it. I've got to get another one tomorrow. I'm going to  
make a list of all the things I've got to get. A massage and a wave  
and a collar for the dog and one of those cute little ash-trays where  
you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother's  
grave that'll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won't  
forget all the things I got to do."

It was nine o'clock--almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch  
and found it was ten. Mrs. Diamond was asleep on a chair with her fists  
clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my  
handkerchief I wiped from her cheek the remains of the spot of dried  
lather that had worried me all afternoon.

The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through  
the smoke and from time to time groaning faintly. People disappeared,  
reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other,  
searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. Some time  
toward midnight Amethyst Quartz and Mrs. Miller stood face to face  
discussing in impassioned voices whether Mrs. Miller had any right to  
mention Peridot's name.

"Peridot! Peridot! Peridot!" shouted Mrs. Miller. "I'll say it whenever I want  
to! Peridot! Peri----"

Making a short deft movement Amethyst Quartz broke her nose with her  
open hand.

Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women's  
voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of  
pain. Mrs. Diamond awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the door.  
When he had gone halfway he turned around and stared at the scene--his  
wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled here and  
there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the  
despairing figure on the couch bleeding fluently and trying to spread  
a copy of "Town Tattle" over the tapestry scenes of Versailles.  
Then Mrs. Diamond turned and continued out the door. Taking my hat from  
the chandelier I followed.

"Come to lunch someday," she suggested, as we groaned down in the  
elevator.

"Where?"

"Anywhere."

"Keep your hands off the lever," snapped the elevator boy.

"I beg your pardon," said Mrs. Diamond with dignity, "I didn't know I was  
touching it."

"All right," I agreed, "I'll be glad to."

. . . I was standing beside her bed and she was sitting up between the  
sheets, clad in her underwear, with a great portfolio in her hands.

"Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . .  
Brooklyn Bridge . . . ."

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of Pennsylvania  
Station, staring at the morning "Tribune" and waiting for the four  
o'clock train.


	3. Third One's The Charm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> See the continuing adventures of Steven in a world where he is the narrator of Great Gatsby.
> 
> (Hope you guys enjoy the way I'm just changing names all over.)

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In  
her blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the  
whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the  
afternoon I watched her guests diving from the tower of her raft or  
taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while her two motor-boats  
slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of  
foam. On week-ends her Dondai Supremo became an omnibus, bearing parties  
to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past  
midnight, while her station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to  
meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants including an extra  
gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers  
and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer  
in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back  
door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the  
kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an  
hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's  
thumb.

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several  
A hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas  
tree of Lazuli's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with  
glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of  
harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.  
In the main hall, a bar with a real brass rail was set up and stocked  
with gins and liquors and with cordials that were so long forgotten that most of  
her female guests were too young to know one from another.

By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived--no thin five-piece affair  
but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and  
cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have  
come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from  
New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and  
salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair shorn in  
strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The  
bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the  
garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and  
casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and  
enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and  
now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of  
voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute,  
spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups  
change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the  
same breath--already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave  
here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp,  
joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph  
glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the  
constantly changing light.

Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal (wink, wink) seizes a cocktail out  
of the air, dumps it down for courage, and moving her hands like  
Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the  
orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a  
burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Sunshine Justice's understudy from the "Big Show." The party has begun.

I believe that on the first night I went to Lazuli's house I was one of  
the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not  
invited--they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out  
to Long Island and somehow they ended up at Lazuli's door. Once there  
they were introduced by somebody who knew Lazuli and after that, they  
conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with  
amusement parks. Sometimes they came and went without having met Lazuli  
at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own  
ticket of admission.

I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin's egg  
blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly  
formal note from his employer--the honor would be entirely Lazuli's, it  
said, if I would attend his "little party" that night. She had  
seen me several times and had intended to call on me long before  
but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it--signed  
Lapis Lazuli by a majestic hand.

Dressed up in white flannels I went over to her lawn a little after  
seven and wandered around rather ill-at-ease among swirls and eddies  
of people I didn't know--though here and there was a face I had noticed  
on the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of young  
Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry  
and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous  
Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or  
insurance or automobiles. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the  
easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few  
words in the right key.

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or  
three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an  
amazing way and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements  
that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place  
in the garden where a single man could linger without looking  
purposeless and alone.

I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when  
Connie Maheswaran came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble  
steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest  
down into the garden.

Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone  
before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passers-by.

"Hello!" I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally  
loud across the garden.

"I thought you might be here," she responded absently as I came up.  
"I remembered you lived next door to----"

She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she'd take care  
of me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin red dresses  
who stopped at the foot of the steps.

"Hello!" they cried together. "Sorry that you didn't win."

That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week  
before.

"You don't know who we are," said one of the girls in red, "but we  
met you here about a month ago."

"You've dyed your hair since then," remarked Connie, and I started  
but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the  
premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer's  
basket. With Connie's slender golden arm resting in mine we descended  
the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at  
us through the twilight and we sat down at a table with the two girls in  
yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Queasy.

"Do you come to these parties often?" inquired Connie of the girl  
beside her.

"The last one was the one I met you at," answered the girl, in an alert,  
confident voice. She turned to her companion: "Wasn't it for you,  
Ashly?"

It was for Ashly, too.

"I like to come," Ashly said. "I never care what I do, so I always have  
a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked  
me my name and address--inside of a week I got a package from Keystone's  
with a new evening gown in it."

"Did you keep it?" asked Connie.

"Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the  
bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two  
hundred and sixty-five dollars."

"There's something funny about a fellow that'll do a thing like that,"  
said the other girl eagerly. "He doesn't want any trouble with ANYbody."

"Who doesn't?" I inquired.

"Lazuli. Somebody told me----"

The two girls and Connie leaned together confidentially.

"Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once."

A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and  
listened eagerly.

"I don't think it's so much THAT," argued Lucille skeptically; "it's  
more that he was a German spy during the war."

One of the men nodded in confirmation.

"I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in  
Germany," he assured us positively.

"Oh, no," said the first girl, "it couldn't be that, because he was in  
the American army during the war." As our credulity switched back to  
her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. "You look at him sometimes when  
he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man."

She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and  
looked around for Lazuli. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he  
inspired that there were whispers about him from those who found little  
that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.

The first supper--there would be another one after midnight--was now  
being served, and Connie invited me to join her own party who were  
spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were  
three married couples and Connie's escort, a persistent undergraduate  
given to violent innuendo and obviously under the impression  
that sooner or later Connie was going to yield him up her person  
to a greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling this party  
had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the  
function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside--East  
Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its  
spectroscopic gayety.

"Let's get out," whispered Connie, after a somehow wasteful and  
inappropriate half hour. "This is much too polite for me."

We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host--I  
had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The  
undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way.

The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded but Lazuli was not there.  
She couldn't find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn't on the  
veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked  
into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and  
probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.

A stout, middle-aged man with enormous owl-eyed spectacles was  
sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with  
unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he  
wheeled excitedly around and examined Connie from head to foot.

"What do you think?" he demanded impetuously.

"About what?"

He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.

"About that. As a matter of fact you needn't bother to ascertain. I  
ascertained. They're real."

"The books?"

He nodded.

"Absolutely real--have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice  
durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real. Pages  
and--Here! Lemme show you."

Taking our skepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and  
returned with Volume One of the "Stoddard Lectures."

"See!" he cried triumphantly. "It's a bona fide piece of printed matter.  
It fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What  
thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too--didn't cut the pages.  
But what do you want? What do you expect?"

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf  
muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable  
to collapse.

"Who brought you?" he demanded. "Or did you just come? I was brought.  
Most people were brought."

Connie looked at him alertly, cheerfully without answering.

"I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt," he continued. "Mrs. Claud  
Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I've  
been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me  
up to sit in a library."

"Has it?"

"A little bit, I think. I can't tell yet. I've only been here  
an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They're real. They're----"

"You told us."

We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.

There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden, old men pushing  
young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples  
holding each other tortuously, fashionably and keeping in the  
corners--and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically  
or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or  
the traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had  
sung in Italian and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz and between  
the numbers people were doing "stunts" all over the garden, while happy  
vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage  
"twins"--who turned out to be the girls in yellow--did a baby act in  
costume and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger bowls.  
The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of  
silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the  
banjoes on the lawn.

I was still with Connie Maheswaran. We were sitting at a table with a man of  
about my age and a rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest  
provocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I  
had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed  
before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.

"Your face is familiar," he said, politely. "Weren't you in the Third  
Division during the war?"

"Why, yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-Gun Battalion."

"I was in the Seventh Infantry until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I'd  
seen you somewhere before."

We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France.  
Evidently he lived in this vicinity for he told me that he had just  
bought a hydroplane and was going to try it out in the morning.

"Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound."

"What time?"

"Any time that suits you best."

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Connie looked around  
and smiled.

"Having a gay time now?" she inquired.

"Much better." I turned again to my new acquaintance. "This is an unusual  
party for me. I haven't even seen the host. I live over there----" I waved  
my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, "and this man Lazuli sent  
over his chauffeur with an invitation."

For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.

"I'm Lazuli," he said suddenly.

"What!" I exclaimed. "Oh, I beg your pardon."

"I thought you knew, old sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very good host."

He smiled understandingly--much more than understandingly. It was  
one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance  
in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or  
seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then  
concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It  
understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in  
you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it  
had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to  
convey. Precisely at that point it vanished--and I was looking at an  
elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate  
formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he  
introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his  
words with care.

Almost at the moment when Mr. Lazuli identified himself a butler  
hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on  
the wire. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of us  
in turn.

"If you want anything just ask for it, old sport," he urged me.  
"Excuse me. I will rejoin you later."

When he was gone I turned immediately to Connie--constrained to assure her  
of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Lazuli would be a florid and  
corpulent person in his middle years.

"Who is he?" I demanded. "Do you know?"

"He's just a man named Lazuli."

"Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?"

"Now YOU're started on the subject," she answered with a wan smile.  
"Well,--he told me once he was an Oxford man."

A dim background started to take shape behind him but at her  
next remark it faded away.

"However, I don't believe it."

"Why not?"

"I don't know," she insisted, "I just don't think he went there."

Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl's "I think  
he killed a man," and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I  
would have accepted without question the information that Lazuli sprang  
from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York.  
That was comprehensible. But young men didn't--at least in my provincial  
inexperience I believed they didn't--drift coolly out of nowhere and buy  
a palace on Long Island Sound.

"Anyhow he gives large parties," said Connie, changing the subject  
with an urbane distaste for the concrete. "And I like large parties.  
They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy."

There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader  
rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he cried. "At the request of Mr. Lazuli we are  
going to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff's latest work which attracted  
so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers  
you know there was a big sensation." He smiled with jovial condescension  
and added "Some sensation!" whereupon everybody laughed.

"The piece is known," he concluded lustily, "as 'Vladimir Tostoff's  
Jazz History of the World.' "

The nature of Mr. Tostoff's composition eluded me, because just as  
it began my eyes fell on Lazuli, standing alone on the marble steps  
and looking from one group to another with approving eyes.  
His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and  
his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could  
see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was  
not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed  
to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased.  
When the "Jazz History of the World" was over girls were putting  
their heads on men's shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were  
swooning backward playfully into men's arms, even into groups knowing  
that some one would arrest their falls--but no one swooned backward on  
Lazuli and no French bob touched Lazuli's shoulder and no singing  
quartets were formed with Lazuli's head for one link.

"I beg your pardon."

Lazuli's butler was suddenly standing beside us.

"Miss Maheswaran?" he inquired. "I beg your pardon but Mr. Lazuli would like  
to speak to you alone."

"With me?" she exclaimed in surprise.

"Yes, madame."

She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment,  
and followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore  
her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes--there  
was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to  
walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.

I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and  
intriguing sounds had issued from a long many-windowed room which  
overhung the terrace. Eluding Connie's undergraduate who was now  
engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who  
implored me to join him, I went inside.

The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was  
playing the piano and beside her stood a tall, red haired young lady  
from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of  
champagne and during the course of her song she had decided ineptly  
that everything was very very sad--she was not only singing, she was  
weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with  
gasping broken sobs and then took up the lyric again in a quavering  
soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks--not freely, however, for when  
they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an  
inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A  
humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face  
whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair and went off into  
a deep vinous sleep.

"She had a fight with a man who says he's her husband," explained a  
girl at my elbow.

I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights  
with men said to be their husbands. Even Connie's party, the quartet  
from East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was  
talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife after  
attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent  
way broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks--at intervals she  
appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed "You  
promised!" into his ear.

The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at  
present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant  
wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised  
voices.

"Whenever he sees I'm having a good time he wants to go home."

"Never heard anything so selfish in my life."

"We're always the first ones to leave."

"So are we."

"Well, we're almost the last tonight," said one of the men sheepishly.  
"The orchestra left half an hour ago."

In spite of the wives' agreement that such malevolence was beyond  
credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were  
lifted kicking into the night.

As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and  
Connie Maheswaran and Lazuli came out together. He was saying some last word  
to her but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into  
formality as several people approached him to say goodbye.

Connie's party were calling impatiently to her from the porch but she  
lingered for a moment to shake hands.

"I've just heard the most amazing thing," she whispered. "How long were  
we in there?"

"Why,--about an hour."

"It was--simply amazing," she repeated abstractedly. "But I swore  
I wouldn't tell it and here I am tantalizing you." She yawned  
gracefully in my face. "Please come and see me. . . . Phone book.  
. . . Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard. . . . My aunt. . . ."  
She was hurrying off as she talked--her brown hand waved a  
jaunty salute as she melted into her party at the door.

Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I  
joined the last of Lazuli's guests who were clustered around him. I  
wanted to explain that I'd hunted for him early in the evening and to  
apologize for not having known him in the garden.

"Don't mention it," he enjoined me eagerly. "Don't give it another  
thought, old sport." The familiar expression held no more familiarity  
than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. "And don't forget  
we're going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning at nine o'clock."

Then the butler, behind his shoulder:

"Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir."

"All right, in a minute. Tell them I'll be right there. . . . good  
night."

"Good night."

"Good night." He smiled--and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant  
significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired  
it all the time. "Good night, old sport. . . . Good night."

But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over.  
Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and  
tumultuous scene. In the ditch beside the road, right side up but  
violently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coupé which had left Lazuli's  
drive not two minutes before. The sharp jut of a wall accounted for the  
detachment of the wheel which was now getting considerable attention from  
half a dozen curious chauffeurs. However, as they had left their cars  
blocking the road a harsh discordant din from those in the rear had been  
audible for some time and added to the already violent confusion of  
the scene.

A man in a long duster had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in  
the middle of the road, looking from the car to the tire and from the  
tire to the observers in a pleasant, puzzled way.

"See!" he explained. "It went in the ditch."

The fact was infinitely astonishing to him--and I recognized first the  
unusual quality of wonder and then the man--it was the late patron of  
Lazuli's library.

"How'd it happen?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"I know nothing whatever about mechanics," he said decisively.

"But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?"

"Don't ask me," said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter.  
"I know very little about driving--next to nothing. It happened,  
and that's all I know."

"Well, if you're a poor driver you oughtn't to try driving at night."

"But I wasn't even trying," he explained indignantly, "I wasn't even  
trying."

An awed hush fell upon the bystanders.

"Do you want to commit suicide?"

"You're lucky it was just a wheel! A bad driver and not even TRYing!"

"You don't understand," explained the criminal. "I wasn't driving. There's  
another man in the car."

The shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained  
"Ah-h-h!" as the door of the coupé swung slowly open. The crowd--it was  
now a crowd--stepped back involuntarily and when the door had opened wide  
there was a ghostly pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale  
dangling individual stepped out of the wreck, pawing tentatively at the  
ground with a large uncertain dancing shoe.

Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the incessant  
groaning of the horns the apparition stood swaying for a moment before  
he perceived the man in the duster.

"Wha's matter?" he inquired calmly. "Did we run outa gas?"

"Look!"

Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel--he stared  
at it for a moment and then looked upward as though he suspected that  
it had dropped from the sky.

"It came off," some one explained.

He nodded.

"At first I din' notice we'd stopped."

A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders  
he remarked in a determined voice:

"Wonder'ff tell me where there's a gas'line station?"

At least a dozen men, some of them little better off than he was,  
explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical  
bond.

"Back out," he suggested after a moment. "Put her in reverse."

"But the WHEEL'S off!"

He hesitated.

"No harm in trying," he said.

The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and  
cut across the lawn toward home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a moon  
was shining over Lazuli's house, making the night fine as before and  
surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A  
sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great  
doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host who  
stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.

  
Reading over what I have written so far I see I have given the  
impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all  
that absorbed me. On the contrary they were merely casual events in a  
crowded summer and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less  
than my personal affairs.

Most of the time I worked. In the early morning, the sun threw my shadow  
westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower Empire City to the  
Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their  
first names and lunched with them in dark crowded restaurants on  
little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short  
affair with a girl who lived in Jersey and worked in the  
The accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in my  
direction so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow  
quietly away.

I took dinner usually at the Jayhawk Club--for some reason, it was the  
The gloomiest event of my day--and then I went upstairs to the library and  
studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour.  
There were generally a few rioters around but they never came into the  
library so it was a good place to work. After that, if the night was  
mellow I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Keystone Hotel  
and over Thirty-third Street to the Pennsylvania Station.

I began to like Empire City, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night  
and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and  
machines give to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and  
pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few  
minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever  
know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their  
apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled  
back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the  
enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes,  
and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows  
waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner--young clerks  
in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five  
deep with throbbing taxi-cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a  
sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited,  
and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted  
cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that  
I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate  
excitement, I wished them well.

For a while, I lost sight of Connie Maheswaran, and then in midsummer, I found  
her again. At first, I was flattered to go places with her because she  
was a tennis champion and everyone knew her name. Then it was  
something more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of  
tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the  
world concealed something--most affectations conceal something  
eventually, even though they don't in the beginning--and one day I found  
what it was. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she  
left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied  
about it--and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded  
me that night at Peridot's. At her first big tennis tournament, there was a  
row that nearly reached the newspapers--a suggestion that she had moved  
her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached  
the proportions of a scandal--then died away. A caddy retracted his  
statement and the only other witness admitted that he might have been  
mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.

Connie Maheswaran instinctively avoided clever shrewd men and now I saw  
that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence  
from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest.  
She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this  
unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she  
was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the  
world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body.

It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never  
blame deeply--I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was at that  
same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a  
car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our  
fender flicked a button on one man's coat.

"You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more  
careful or you oughtn't to drive at all."

"I am careful."

"No, you're not."

"Well, other people are," she said lightly.

"What's that got to do with it?"

"They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an  
accident."

"Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself."

"I hope I never will," she answered. "I hate careless people. That's why  
I like you."

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had  
deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved  
her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes  
on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of  
that tangle back home. I'd been writing letters once a week and signing  
them: "Love, Steven," and all I could think of was how, when that certain  
girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her  
upper lip. Nevertheless, there was a vague understanding that had to be  
tactfully broken off before I was free.

Everyone suspects themselves of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and  
this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.


End file.
